In praise of corporate jargon? How you say what you say matters

Should we reconsider how we think about corporate jargon? The answer is “yes,” according to Andrea Javor in a column in the April 30, 2026, Wall Street Journal titled “Corporate Jargon Saved My Self-Esteem.” She opened my eyes to a new way to use the jargon that I so often rail against.

The project and the fail

Javor had the great idea to merge her company’s call center with the social media department. It flopped. She writes that her boss had options for how to respond, both of which were true:

• Option 1: “Andrea, you were an utter failure and wasted 18 months of everyone’s time”; or

• Option 2: ”Andrea, you were building the plane while you flew it. Let’s sunset the initiative now and go back to what we were doing.”

He picked Option 2. She writes that picking this option led to this result:

At work . . . conversations involve large amounts of jargon. Jargon . . . enables colleagues to speak in the collective, which comes in handy when something goes wrong. Responsibility can then remain defuse, so people can talk about mistakes without the emotional hit of assigning blame.

In short, corporate talk let the boss tell the truth without shaming Javor, and, in the process, showed her how to do so with others. Less emotion, more progress.

Bottom line

Javor notes other useful jargon:

• “Let’s put a pin it” instead of “This will never happen.”